Opinion: 80 years on, could Okinawa again become a battlefield?

The Mainichi

21-06-2025

It has been over three years since our daily routine has come to include being shown the ominous flashes of light from missiles and their violent flames on the morning and evening TV news. The abnormal reality of civilians in urban areas suddenly being killed by the latest weapons has extended from Ukraine and Palestine to Iran and Israel.
Television and newspapers often avoid showing viewers and readers what they don't want to see, but under the light and flames lie crushed faces, torn limbs and bodies with exposed organs.
On May 3, during a meeting hosted by the Shinto Seiji Renmei (Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership) and the right-wing group Nippon Kaigi in the Okinawa Prefecture capital of Naha, ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) House of Councillors legislator Shoji Nishida made a misguided statement about the Himeyuri Cenotaph, built in memory of female student corps members who were mobilized and died in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The comment caused a stir when it became widely known, but there was a serious omission in the media's coverage of the issue: Nishida's motivation.
Nishida prefaced his remarks with the following words: "Before an extraordinary emergency situation actually arises in the future, we must establish laws that are able to protect the people. To do so, LDP lawmakers must tackle the incorrect postwar education and nonsense that has been perpetuated."
In essence, he was suggesting that the day when Japanese citizens could die in war was not far off, and the first battleground would likely be Okinawa.
In the July issue of the opinion magazine Gekkan Nippon, former LDP Vice President Taku Yamasaki, a heavyweight among the party's lawmakers with influence over defense policies and budgets, harshly criticized hawkish statements by Japanese and U.S. politicians who claimed that a Taiwan contingency would be a Japan contingency.
"If that were the case, although everyone hesitates to say it, there is even a possibility that the whole of Okinawa could be destroyed," he said.
It was a warning that such a situation must never be allowed to happen, and that the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) could not legally be deployed in the first place.
Despite the concerns of senior figures, however, former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida repeatedly stated, "Ukraine could be East Asia tomorrow," and increased Japan's defense budget by more than 1.5 times, explicitly including the capability to strike enemy bases in the country's National Defense Strategy.
I have previously written about issues relating to Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines Japan's war dead. The SDF is steadily "preparing for death." According to the May 16 digital edition of the Japanese Communist Party's Shimbun Akahata newspaper, the Ground Self-Defense Force has concluded an agreement, details of which are unknown, with the largest domestic funeral service business group to "prepare for any eventuality."
This is no different from the prewar period. Military personnel are only concerned about their own prestige and their compensation, with no time to think about the fate of civilians. Yasukuni Shrine represents a state-sponsored scheme to divide the war dead between the public and private sectors, between the famous and the obscure, between honorable and futile deaths. It appears dormant now, but it wouldn't be surprising for it to start up again at any moment.
We have become numb to missile footage, and some of us have started to passively accept the idea that we might die that way, too, sooner or later. June 23 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa.